Thread: Re: [PERFORM] [SQL] Unanswered Questions WAS: An unresolved performance problem.
Re: [PERFORM] [SQL] Unanswered Questions WAS: An unresolved performance problem.
From
Tom Lane
Date:
Randall Lucas <rlucas@tercent.net> writes: > I suspect that a good number of fairly simple questions aren't being > answered because they're either misdirected or because the poster > hasn't included an "answerable" question (one with sufficient > information to answer). That's always been a problem, but it does seem to have been getting worse lately. > A suggestion to partially counter this, at least for "slow query" type > questions, has been put forth. If we make it a social norm on the > pg-lists in general to reply off-list to inadequately descriptive "slow > query" questions with a canned message of helpful guidance, we may be > able to up the level of "answerability" of most questions. The idea of some canned guidance doesn't seem bad, but I'm not sure if it should be off-list or not. If newbies are corrected off-list then other newbies who might be lurking, or reading the archives, don't learn any better and will make the same mistakes in their turn. How about a standard answer of "you haven't really provided enough info for us to be helpful, please see this-URL for some hints"? That would avoid bulking up the list archives with many copies, yet at the same time the archives would provide evidence of the existence of hints... > Thoughts? Josh and I have placed a draft at > http://techdocs.postgresql.org/guides/SlowQueryPostingGuidelines Looks good, though I concur with Stephan's comment that the table schemas aren't optional. It might be worth including a checklist of the standard kinds of errors (for example, datatype mismatch preventing index usage). Come to think of it, that starts to make it look like a FAQ list directed towards performance issues. Maybe we could make this a subsection of the main FAQ? regards, tom lane
Re: [PERFORM] [SQL] Unanswered Questions WAS: An unresolved performance problem.
From
Sean Chittenden
Date:
> > I suspect that a good number of fairly simple questions aren't > > being answered because they're either misdirected or because the > > poster hasn't included an "answerable" question (one with > > sufficient information to answer). > > That's always been a problem, but it does seem to have been getting > worse lately. I hate to point this out, but "TIP 4" is getting a bit old and the 6 tips that we throw out to probably about 40K people about 1-200 times a day have probably reached saturation. Without looking at the archives, I bet anyone a shot of good scotch that, it's probably pretty infrequent that people don't kill -9 their postmasters. Any chance we could flush out the TIPs at the bottom to include, "VACUUM ANALYZE your database regularly," or "When reporting a problem, include the output from EXPLAIN [query]," or "ANALYZE tables before examining the output from an EXPLAIN [query]," or "Visit [url] for a tutorial on (schemas|triggers|views)." -sc -- Sean Chittenden
Re: [PERFORM] [SQL] Unanswered Questions WAS: An unresolved performance problem.
From
johnnnnnn
Date:
On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 09:57:49PM -0700, Sean Chittenden wrote: > I hate to point this out, but "TIP 4" is getting a bit old and the 6 > tips that we throw out to probably about 40K people about 1-200 > times a day have probably reached saturation. Without looking at > the archives, I bet anyone a shot of good scotch that, it's probably > pretty infrequent that people don't kill -9 their postmasters. > > Any chance we could flush out the TIPs at the bottom to include, > "VACUUM ANALYZE your database regularly," or "When reporting a > problem, include the output from EXPLAIN [query]," or "ANALYZE > tables before examining the output from an EXPLAIN [query]," or > "Visit [url] for a tutorial on (schemas|triggers|views)." Better yet, have TIPs that are appropriate to the subscribed list. -performance has different posting guidelines, things to try, etc. than does -bugs, than does -sql (than does -hackers, than does -interfaces, ...). I don't know how feasible it is to separate them out, but i think it's worth looking into. -johnnnnnnnnnnn